PRETTY UGLY by Kirsty Gunn — Review by Stella

Kirsty Gunn can write, she really can, but do I want to read these stories? Yes, with caution! In Pretty Ugly Gunn confounds us with the sublime and the rot. Here what seems too good to be true is just that. Not good. The opening story, ‘Blood Knowledge’, lets us wander in a beautiful garden with a successful author. We warm to the narrator’s voice, her frustration with her role as wife and mother, as an author with a predictable and highly sort after series. Her next book is overdue and as we read on we sense a festering sore. A scab picked at. This isn’t a nice suburban story, not a success story except in the warped mind of our narrator. Yet it’s compelling in its horror, has catches of humour, and observations that capture society’s double standards. Ultimately it’s horrific, but getting there raises questions which deserve consideration. The human condition examined with the sharp edge of Gunn’s pen leaves us exposed and sometimes guessing — piecing clues, trying to catch the unsaid — reading between the lines; we enter the stories with a sense of innocence and leave with a shudder. Pretty Ugly fits in the New Zealand gothic tradition, with the likes of The Scarecrow (Morrison) and Sydney Bridge Upside Down (Ballantyne). Here the edges press in. Gunn from here and living elsewhere (Scotland) has lost none of the sense of the impending gloom, the darkness of wild and unfettered places, and here she uses nature’s darkness to unsettling good effect, double-dosing not only with environment but with the dark corners of the psyche. Each word is necessary in Gunn’s writing, and each encounter slippery — our narrators unexpectedly draw us in and repel us. Pretty Ugly is intriguing, questionable, and razor sharp.